Caden

A year after the events that forever changed her life, 15-year-old Caden Roth is searching for a kind of stability that is not easy to find in her new world.

From Interitas Volume 2: False Prophets

The more time that elapsed between her and the events of 2014, the easier it was for her to keep them from consuming every single thought twenty-four hours a day, but even now they were always there, chewing at the edges of her brain. Some days the chewing was louder than others, and this was one of those days.

2014 had sucked as far as Caden was concerned. She didn’t think “sucked” was even close to the right word for it, but there were no words that did an adequate job of describing the depth of the horrors of that particular year, so she went with “sucked” for no other good reason than she liked saying it.

2015 didn’t suck. It wasn’t that it was necessarily fantastic, but no one had tried to shoot her, blow her up, or run her down with a bus—all of which had happened to her in 2014—so she figured that was an improvement no matter how you were measuring things. For the first few months after the craziness, both she and everyone around her was on high alert, waiting for more people or things to come after her. But some sort of cosmic “cloaking” had been created that kept the bad guys from being able to easily find her, and everyone else who knew where she was either died or scurried off into a hole to lick their wounds. No one knew for sure where the cloak had come from or how long it would last, but she was certainly grateful for it.

She could still see ghosts, spirits, and all other manner of beings as they crossed over from the limbo world of Interitas. Collectively, they were known as manes, and most of them were harmless—lost souls who often didn’t even know they were dead and were just looking for a way to finish their journey to whichever side they were heading. Her encounters with spirits in the last year had mostly been innocuous, often happening in specific places to which the manes had some sort of connection. Once she learned them, she tried to avoid those spots as much as possible, but Savannah was called the most haunted city in America, so it wasn’t easy.

There had only been a couple of scary incidents. The worst was probably when she had been walking through a farmer’s market in the spring and stumbled upon a specter—a soul that was enraged by someone or something specific and wanted to wreak havoc on that person or place. The specter’s anger was not directed at her, but as soon as it realized she could see it, it turned its fury in her direction. Caden thought the other shoppers must have believed she was a crazy person, running through the narrow maze of stalls as various bits of produce mysteriously pelted her. Once she got about a block away, the attack stopped. She had not been back to that farmer’s market since.

But that was the exception rather than the rule, and to her way of thinking, once you’ve had someone shoot at you with a cannon, which had also happened last August, an apple to the head really didn’t seem like that big of a deal.